


Hale House for Wayward Cats

by SushiOwl



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Gen, pure silliness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-18
Updated: 2013-07-18
Packaged: 2017-12-20 13:10:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,205
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/887667
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SushiOwl/pseuds/SushiOwl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Derek is trying to rebuild his family home, and some unwanted fuzzy roommates move in.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hale House for Wayward Cats

Rebuilding his family home was an endeavor Derek knew was going to take months, maybe even years, but he had to do it, and he had to do it alone. He felt he owed it to his family to gut the house, remove the charred remains and replace them with sturdy beams and warm wood. He didn’t want to remember them as they were burning, dying and screaming. He wanted to bring the house back to life, make it a home again, something real for his pack. Something real for him.

It was a week into his construction when the first one arrived. He was building up the the fireplace when he heard a scratchy ‘mow!’ behind him, and he turned to find a cat behind him. It was a scrawny calico with squinty green eyes and a tail that had a funny crook at the end of it. It stared up at him, as if expectant, pointed ears up.

He blinked at it. Normally cats avoided him like the plague. “Shoo," he told it, making a dismissive hand motion at it. It looked affronted, before it turned and ran into the recesses of his house, disappearing. “Whatever," he said, before he went back to his task.

Two days later he saw it again. He was standing on the porch, glazing absently into the woods, his thought focused inward. He spotted a dash of movement out of the corner of his eye and looked over to find the cat. It had a fat rat in its mouth, and it glanced at him, eyes glinting from the porch light. Its tail twitched, and it dashed away.

"Right," Derek said, before he went back inside.

Redoing the stairs was a bitch and a half, and he was privately proud of himself when he was done with them. Now he wouldn’t have to avoid the middle of the steps for fear of falling through them. He dusted off his hands on his pants and went to get something to eat. When he came back to go upstairs to start on the bedrooms, he stopped when he found the cat curled up on the second step. It looked less skinny than last time, maybe from all the hunting it was doing.

"How did you get in here?" he muttered to it, and its ears twitched toward him but it didn’t open its eyes. He halfheartedly glared at it, before he just stepped over it and headed upstairs.

A few days later Derek was hauling ruined, burned wood out through the backdoor when he spotted a long-limbed orange cat sitting on a disused chair and licking itself. He tossed the refuse onto the pile he was making and stared at the new cat. “Now where did you come from?" he growled in its general direction, before he went back through the door. The ginger cat scampered inside before he could shut it, running full tilt. “Hey!" he called after it, before he grumbled.

Ten minutes of searching revealed no cat, calico or ginger, and Derek huffed before he threw up his hands. Whatever. He wasn’t going to feed any cat, so they would eventually move on. Hopefully.

He saw the next cat several days later when he was passing through the lower floor, a bundle of 2x4s on his shoulder. He stopped dead when he saw something out of the corner of his eye, turning his head to look. There was a small black and white cat sitting in the doorway to the basement. He blinked at him owlishly, before it dashed down the stairs. He swallowed, before he closed his eyes and shook his head. No. The basement was last.

He was remodeling the upstairs bathroom two weeks later, on his knees laying tile, when he looked up and there was a grey tabby with a flat face sitting in the sink and looking at him. “Really?" he said, staring up at it. “Where are you assholes even coming from?" To that the cat gave a low noise that sounded almost like a moo.

Derek got up, glaring down at it, before he reached over and turned on the tap a little, just to scare the cat. It scuttled out of the sink, before it turned to stare at the thin stream of water. Then it leaned in and started to drink it, getting water all over its furry chin. Rolling his eyes, Derek turned off the water, and the cat looked up at him, before it walked over and headbutted his belly with a purr. With a sedated growl, Derek went back to his work.

Going down into the basement of his home was harder than he had thought it would be. He hadn’t been since the fire, not since the bodies of his family had been pulled out. He ran his hands over the charred cement walls, sighing as he thought about how much effort it would take to wash the burn out. He guessed he would have to paint them.

As he went through his plans for the basement in his head, walking the perimeter, he stopped when he spotted a sleek black cat with bright yellow eyes sitting on a dilapidated piece of furniture. “Oh come on," he sighed as he turned towards it. “What is with all of the cats?" He had seen all the others through the past month, and now there was another one. Jesus.

The black cat jumped down off the wrecked furniture and walked smoothly over to him, looking up at him with slanted, watchful eyes. “What?" he asked it, somehow used to the fact his life including talking to cats now. It meowed up at him, before it more or less fell against his legs and rubbed along and between them, its long tail curling around his calf. “No, no, none of that," he grumbled, stepping away from it and going about what he was meant to be doing.

As he worked, trucking burned and worthless things up and down the stairs, he kept looking under them at the black cat as it watched him work. After about an hour he found a blanket and brought it down, dropping it under the stairs and narrowing his eyes at the cat as it sniffed it. “Don’t get hair on anything else," he warned, before he went back to working.

By the time he was nearly done, all five cats were curled up on the blanket.

So apparently Derek had cats now. It took him another month to give in and finally start feeding them, worried about the skinniness. And they promptly got fat, which was, fine whatever, assholes. They decided they didn’t need to hunt anymore, so they just sat around doing a lot of nothing, sleeping on Derek’s clean clothes and scratching his couch. He often woke up in the morning bracketed by cats with at least one sleeping on his feet.

Stiles took to calling him a “crazy cat wolf," which earned a mild glare, but he probably didn’t look very intimidating sitting on a couch with one cat in his lap and the others around him. So what if his pack was just a little more furry?

**Author's Note:**

> *throws hands up* I don't even know!


End file.
